Here is what I learned that day: one trespass begets another, each one lowering the threshold for the next, until a man who wouldn’t do a load of the girl’s filthy laundry for fear she’d feel it as an intrusion is crawling around her closet floor, pawing through her most private possessions, justifying it—as all such men do—by claiming these violations are for her own good.
22
Evangeline stood before her old trailer in a gloomy drizzle, firs twitching black limbs in the falling light. The sofa she’d slept on for months lay open in the overgrown yard, sagging under a pile of garbage bags. She tore one open and found her mother’s abandoned clothes. In others, she discovered everything she’d ever considered hers. Even the table lay in shattered pieces as if heaved airborne, broken under its own weight. The trailer itself—now scraped clean of her—had been fortified, plywood nail-gunned over its windows and door. Something savage in it, that nail for every inch, as if to make a point about the foulness of girls like her.
And she was foul, wasn’t she? Isaac thought so at least. The chicken piccata plan hadn’t exactly worked out. She’d had to flee his place with nothing more than what she carried. Now, tired from the trek, she tossed bags off the sofa and collapsed onto it. Her mind was blank. She left it that way. There was a peace in it, the way she could ignore her growling stomach, not worry about the cold. Adults were always preaching at you to “use your brain,” “think things through,” but sometimes, lots of times, it was not-thinking that allowed you to go on.
Fatigue overwhelmed her as she pulled out her mother’s old jeans and leggings, blouses and sweaters. The sofa was damp, and she spread dry clothes as a base to lie on, then piled as many pieces on top of her as she could. Curling fetal, she pressed a sweater to her nose. It smelled of mold. Good. She liked things that told it straight.
It was dark when she woke. She checked the time on her cell. Nearly eight. Isaac had given her the burner phone only yesterday, hoping Evangeline would turn into the kind of animal who’d be lured by the possibility of family, who’d submit to his ridiculous rules: show up for dinner, call to let him know where she was. It made her laugh how he’d presented her with a drug-dealer phone in an effort to domesticate her, how she had almost bought into his promises and lies.
Still, she shouldn’t have called him a fucking bastard. She regretted that now.
When she’d walked into the kitchen a few hours back, he’d been perched at the table like a vulture on a dead branch. Her newspaper clippings and Jonah’s bracelet were spread before him as if they were carrion he planned to digest. This man she had trusted—had so stupidly, stupidly trusted—had invaded her room and clawed through its darkest corners.
In this dismal place, it didn’t matter what happened after that. Just another scene to be forgotten. Evangeline studied what had once been her home, a place where, one spring evening not all that long back, Viv had looked up from her dinner like she was seeing something in her daughter that would make a mother want to stick around.
Evangeline had been wrong about that. Her mother had seen nothing of the sort, and the skillet she’d used back then was tossed aside, half buried in the mud. There was nothing here but rain and ruin, a winter’s coming rot on a cool fall night.
She was shaking in the cold and wet. None of this could be good for the baby, so she forced herself to go over what had happened with Isaac. She needed to know if there was anything to be salvaged with him, because—she would admit it—she wanted to go back to the bed and clothes, to the food and Rufus, even to the man, even after what he had done. She had never trusted him anyway. Every adult she’d ever known had snooped through her stuff.
First, she had stopped at the stores, and that had put her behind. When she got home, she’d walked straight through the mudroom into the kitchen without hanging her coat. Isaac was always in his office this time of day, and she planned to sneak in and transfer the items from her pockets to a cluttered back corner of the fridge. Later, when Isaac was there, she’d dig around, “find” them, say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
But Isaac sat stiff-backed at the kitchen table, and he looked as if . . . She stopped. She hadn’t seen his face, had she? She’d seen the clippings and the bracelet. In the split second before she caught his expression, she played out what would happen next. He would be in a rage. He would kick her out for lying to him, for being involved with his son’s killer, maybe responsible somehow.
She had whirled and retreated. And even as he said, “Evangeline. Please,” she slammed out of the mudroom. She was nearly to the garage when he made it to the back door and yelled, “Please! I want to talk to you.”
And what had she done? She’d grabbed the jar of capers and smashed it on the concrete pad by the gate, screaming, “Fucking bastard! You’re just a fucking bastard!”
And then she had run and run, her legs scissoring, her new backpack pummeling. She ran down the long drive, bounded over roots, dodged vines. She ran past house after house, everything spooling out behind her, the weeks and months of trying to live any way she could, the fear of being caught as she wandered strangers’ halls or darted out the backs of stores, the eyes that landed with hunger or pity or disgust, that turned her limbs and breasts into meat to be judged. The boys. The two dead boys. Could she ever run away from all that?
She turned onto a road end where she knew there was a trail. And when, finally, she was hidden in the trees and dense brush, when she was certain no one else was around, she stumbled to a stop, bent over heaving, and puked.
Running like that hadn’t exactly been her finest moment. But she’d had worse. She wasn’t going to give herself shit over it. Evangeline cast a final glance at the trailer. Her gaze lingered on the slimy remains of petunias, and she pictured her mother coming home puffed up and proud, plunking the pot by the front step. The woman had stood back admiring, then said, “You’ve got to give it to me. If I know anything, it’s how to make a place look nice.” Even then, Evangeline’s heart broke a little—the red close-out sticker on the cheap plastic pot, the flowers thin and sagging.
She turned away from her mother’s shadow, hoisted her pack, and headed toward town. The pizza place closed early these days, and when they did, they tossed their leftover slices in the dumpster in back. After that, she knew a dry place she might go where she could think things through. She could stay the night as long as she was out in the morning, before six thirty or so.
* * *
—
SHE HADN’T HAD TO DIG AROUND THE TRASH. The boy with the slices noticed her loitering nearby and offered them to her, easy as that. Now her belly was full and she was trudging up another dark road, deciding what she’d do if she confronted a locked door. Just then, a truck whizzed by, so close she felt the pull of its draft. Her eyes shot to where it must be cresting the hill. Her breath hitched. The road was empty, just a lone deer crossing, one halting step at a time.
For a second, she thought Jonah had been in that truck. Not his ghost—the boy himself. She knew it couldn’t be him, but it felt like a confusion of time, a past that had managed to catch up with her. She’d been sensing him near all week. Yesterday, she walked by the stairwell door and the scent of his aftershave stopped her dead.